Fall 2013 Business Pitch Competition
Out of 24 teams, five finalists were chosen to pitch their ventures this past Monday night, November 18, at the final round of the fall 2013 Business Pitch Competition for the chance to win $3,500 and the opportunity to present their idea to local angel investors.
The competition, sponsored by The Entrepreneurship Club, The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Richmond Association for Corporate Growth, encouraged University of Richmond’s entrepreneurial and passionate undergraduates to present their innovative ideas to a panel of ten judges, a group of local entrepreneurs and investors, for the chance at one of the three prizes.
Each idea was evaluated for concept, clarity, comprehensiveness, realistic implementation and potential value. The ideas ranged from the conceptual stages to more developed stages approaching implementation. After focused deliberation, the judges chose Lauren Grainger, ’14, founder of LineGuard, to take home the top prize. The second prize of $1,000 went to Brett Csorba, ’14, founder of PageChat, and the third prize of $500 went to Pamir Niaz and Christopher Bahlo, ’14, founders of SweaTee.
Lauren Grainger opened her pitch with her motivating statistic: “over 5 million fly fishermen are annoyed every five seconds” during the process of pulling out the line before casting, all the while attempting to keep the yards of line free of tangles and from catching one’s own feet. Not only is Grainger an accomplished student, but she is also an adept angler, and with her years of experience she has accrued a considerable amount of annoyance, which led her to develop a solution: LineGuard, a secondary spooling accessory that dynamically collects the excess line while preventing tangling. In a market of functionally inferior competitors, Grainger hopes to build a loyal customer base with her dynamic spool. By the end of the year, Grainger plans to produce a prototype, and moving forward she foresees expanding the product line with additional functions, including a cleaning mechanism. With LineGuard, Grainger provides an inventive solution to the angling community that may forever improve the sport of fly fishing.
Second place was Brett Csorba, who developed PageChat, a free Chrome extension that allows users to chat and connect with other PageChat users browsing the same webpage with a drop-down chat window. Csorba, with his past experience in software development projects, saw the opportunity to fill a gap in the social networking sphere; PageChat is one of a kind. Where the relatively closed networks of email and Facebook and the limited interaction within YouTube establish boundaries to communicating and connecting, PageChat forges new channels of communication unbound by address books and contact lists. After a preliminary pitch on Reddit, a user-driven social news and entertainment website, that received an overwhelmingly positive response, Csorba saw a true demand for a product like PageChat. He plans to grow his user base through advertisements on technology-focused websites such as Mashable, technology blogs, and certaintechnology-centric YouTube channels. Csorba hopes PageChat will revolutionize the way users connect online.
Pamir Niaz and Christopher Bahlo won the third place prize of $500 for SweaTee, a sweat-proof undershirt designed to prevent the tell-tale signs of sweat on one’s outer shirt in a business professional environment. Using COOLMAX® fabric, a performance fabric already used in athletic clothing to manage moisture sold in stores such as Dick’s Sporting Goods and L.L.Bean, SweaTee brings this fabric technology to the business world, where high stakes meetings and presentations can be as stress-inducing as strenuous physical activity. Niaz and Bahlo have taken care to design the shirt in a way that makes it as discreet as possible with comfort, fit, fashion, and affordability in mind. They plan to showcase SweaTee at clothing exhibits in the near future to gain exposure and attract buyers. In the next few years, Niaz and Bahlo hope to see their product on department store shelves as the go-to professional undershirt.
The two other finalists in the competition were Fatima Al-Bassam and Manuel Paredes, founders of Feena Khaer, and April Israel, Natasha Gupta, and Liuqi Wang, founders of Generation-O. Each team proved their ingenuity and drive with their finely tuned pitches and the passionate, intelligent and creative spirit of University of Richmond students was on display Monday night.